Creating our first GraphQL server

For this recipe, we are going to create a contacts list in which we will save the name, phone, and email addresses of our friends. 

Getting ready

The first thing we need to do is to create a directory for our project and initialize a new package.json file installing express, graphql, and express-graphql:

  mkdir contacts-graphql
  cd contacts-graphql
  npm init --yes
  npm install express graphql express-graphql babel-preset-env
  npm install -g babel-cli

We need to install babel-preset-env and babel-cli to use ES6 syntax in Node. Also, we need to create a .babelrc file :

  {
    "presets": ["env"]
  }

File: .babelrc

How to do it...

Let's create our first GraphQL server:

1. First, we need to create an index.js file for our Express server:

import express from 'express';

const app = express();

  app.listen(3000, () => console.log('Running server on port 3000'));

File: index.js

2. If you run babel-node index.jsin your terminal, you should be able to see the node server...